Hazy shade of winter

Taking a tally of how I have changed since I began this blog is interesting, almost as interesting as how much the internet itself has changed around it. When I first started this blog, I had an honest-to-goodness blogroll. I let that drop by the wayside as I realized, looking at stats, no one really made use of it. But thinking back to some of the links I can recall being there? Change, change, change.

Runesoup is still out there, of course, though the format has undergone a dramatic transformation and I have all but stopped following it. I am just not that much of a podcast person to start with and there is too great and widening a conceptual gulf between myself and Gordon’s magical work for me to sign on for a premium membership. I can make the effort to translate back and forth sensibly, but it doesn’t seem like there is all that much to be gained by that effort. The Red Line, though, still part of the backdrop for me.

The Archdruid Report has shut down, the entire archive moved offline to print, though I had stopped reading that blog long before the closure. Again, the gap between myself and Greer was transparently wide in ways that made his latter-day work there seem flat or even annoying. It served an important purpose for me, though, in helping me to conceptualize the way collapse begins invisibly and becomes increasingly visible. It seems Greer, too, felt an increasing gap between the blog and the present, between the call for preparation and the arrival of the crunch which would make preparation too-little, too-late.

The Mystic Cup is still around, but largely dormant.

XKCD is still chugging along, though it has stopped being a reference point for me. It was always a minor one, but it mostly leaves me cold where once I would chuckle or be tickled by some small synchronicity. In webcomics generally, I am still reading Questionable Content, picked up reading Dumbing of Age (I think it has to do with how the second adulting that comes with transition resonates with the coming of age college world?), but generally reading very little there. A lot of webcomics artists from that period have moved away from webcomics toward other avenues, so there just aren’t as many I’m familiar with.

Warrenellis.com has turned into little more than a placeholder, though I still follow Ellis through a lot of other mediums. I picked up Normal and actually managed to get it signed by him, a silly and fannish delight. I am still reading his irregular Morning.computer, his newsletter Orbital Operations, and pick up whatever comics he’s been working on from time to time. Castlevania was good fun. I joked that I was going to burn Supreme Blue Rose and consume it, so, yeah, Warren Ellis has persisted in ways a lot of other reference points haven’t.

Heck, thanks to Warren Ellis, I was still walking in the comic store from time to time and so got new comics pointed at me, which has led me to a bunch of writers that I have come to enjoy the heck out of when I have some time and opportunity: Gail Simone, Magdalene Visaggio, Saladin Ahmed, Kieron Gillen, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and a handful of others. Comics and comics writers have been genuinely refreshing to me in ways that a lot of things haven’t.

I have dipped in and out of several blogs on and off throughout this blog’s run and a lot of those blogs have changed, too. There has been a general slow down as social media took center stage for discussions. Some blogs have shifted focus, slowed down, shut down, vanished overnight. Blogos is still going and I owe that blog some bit of thanks for helping to reorient my thinking about the Kabbalah in ways that were much more productive to me. Take a look at that blogroll and you’ll see a few of those other blogs I have been dipping in and out of, too, though some are no longer there to be included.

* * *

I think you see the tenor of where this is going, right? It is closing time at Disrupt & Repair. The blog isn’t going to shut down overnight. Far from it, I have a clear sense of where I want the blog to end. This last year has been very quiet for this blog, but is has been intense spiritually, intellectually, and personally. The last few months, especially, have felt like a homecoming in terms of how I understand and experience the spiritual work. I want to bring some sense of that homecoming here, to the blog, as something of a capstone.

I am going to start revisiting the arcs of this blog’s trajectory. They have always been fairly clear to me and I can make much better sense of them from my current perspective. I am going to start working on some posts to talk about those arcs, integrating and developing what was nascent in them into a (hopefully) coherent and mature account. I started this blog with a willful stupidity, willing to grab hold of convenient terms and set them to work in understanding what was going on in my spiritual life, but I can do better now. I can provide terms that are much less contingent, with a more meaningful conceptual horizon for other people.

After I have completed that, revealed what I take to be the heart of the blog, I am going to rework those posts into a series of pages which will become the face of this blog. Once those are up, I will be done here. Maybe there is another project after this one? I don’t know and right now I am not going to worry about it. If there is, I’ll let you know.

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2 thoughts on “Hazy shade of winter”

I’ve not been reading your blog or commenting as often as i’d like recently, and I’m certainly not providing much content that piques your interest, I’m sure. Sewing, of course, has been my own response to the crunch of the times, but there are other forces at work, too — it’s still too little too late — I have a feeling that the clothes of the next century will resemble VIKINGS more than they resemble BUCK ROGERS… On the other hand, I’ll miss your blog once it winds down. Be sure to let me know, though, about whatever you do that comes next?

I have not been generating as much to be read, that is for sure! There are years where I think I wrote more than a 150 posts, this year it has been more like 16.

You are doing fine generating content. As you might imagine, I have enjoyed your Iamblichus posts–it has been a while now since I read him and it is a pleasant refresher.

Anyway, seasons for each thing and I am looking forward to figuring out the details of a proper wind down here. I’ll still be checking my reader (you’re on it), no doubt, and keeping track of a few other blogs.